Ballgame
by healed
Summary: "Yeah when you realise it's a pattern and not a phase, it's what you've become and it's what you will you stay, that's ballgame." Just drabble. Piper/Alex.


**I haven't written a thing in years, and I haven't watched anything oitnb in even longer. I'm horrendously out of practice, but I'm back, and here's some drabble.**

The funny thing about healing is once it's done, once it's gone full circle, it's only inevitable you will go through it again. Everything fades, just like that flicker of a smile Alex used to incite in her. Even the way you've been forcing it eventually fades. Hoisted up like a grimace you've been made to turn upside down, so that it wryly resembles something close to a smile. And one day, it just… _fades._

It took Piper a while to reach that point. In fact, it's taken _years_. It took _time_. Time for restless nights full of _don't think about it, don't think about her_ , and a lot of setbacks when Piper's brain suddenly decided to replay everything she didn't want to remember. The good fragments, the ones full of truth and bursting with promise. _Alex pulling her gently through an airport. Heady breaths a little ragged around the edges, whispered in pitch black hotel rooms. Watching words that fall carelessly out of Alex's mouth, the ones that make Piper fall accidentally a little more in love with her._

A lot of days where Piper's stomach seemed to burn with unavoidable urgency, and would have her reaching for the phone, wanting to call, to hear Alex just _pick up_ the phone. Something rational would tick in her brain. She'd probably be met with silence. But that would be okay, Piper bargains, so long as she could hear a steady exhale of breath falling down the line. Know that Alex was _there_ , forced to know who was on the other line, still stubborn enough not to utter a single word, but still hopelessly connected to dangle precariously at the other end of the line. In another time zone. In another life. But still stuck and stranded by the definite history they shared. But did she even have the same number? Would someone else answer, and would you just hear Alex in the background instead, a happy, contented giggling ricocheting through that leaves you to conjure an image of Alex with a slightly furrowed brow, as she absently considers taking the handset, from a different girl, from a distant life? One that you've been erased from, where there's no memory of you at all? _Is it worth giving the old number a try?_

But one day, all that passes. Piper approaches a mirror and stays there, not out of necessity or a search for stray makeup-brush threads. But because something inside her has changed, something healthy has grown, and it's showing. Everything _Alex_ is so far behind her, banished so deep it doesn't even register. And it's not just a succession of unusual 'good days' that make Piper feel healed and finally, _finally_ whole again, the way her reflection is in that mirror. And it's _accurate._

Piper feels her breath rise and fall in her throat. And for once, there's no empty space in her left unfulfilled. Her heart stammers a little.

Whole. Again.

But Piper completes the circle with the same obliviousness of the universe to the imposition of the years, and all it takes is a little slip, a little fall, and everything is flung wildly out of peaceful order. And then there's suddenly _Litchfield_ blocking up her world _,_ but there's something else, too.

There's _Alex._

Piper swallows hard. Something in her furiously insists she's still healed, still whole again, still completely and utterly _moved on._ But all those times when Piper rehearsed the way she'd see Alex at some theoretical set point in the future - politely decline the prospect of a second chance, of a _let's start again -_ never quite seemed to warn her of the way Alex seemed to pick apart Piper's threads just be looking at her again.

And with a chase of resentment, Piper accepts the fact that 'healed' never lasts long anyway.

 **And just like Piper, I've healed too.**

" **Yeah when you realise it's a pattern and not a phase, it's what you've become and it's what you will you stay, that's ballgame." – Kevin Devine.**


End file.
